Instead of meeting opposition, Larus said developers in Microsoft were excited about the idea after reading an internal white paper Larus and Hunt wrote on the topic. Many on product teams across the company wanted in on the research action, he said.

The sentiment was that going cloud would accelerate the software development process. "Artifacts" and tools could "live in the cloud," Larus said. And testing and statistical analysis would be naturals for a cloud-first approach, he added. Cloud development would promote code reuse and make it easier for everyone to run on a common platform, Larus said.

Wolfram Schulte, another Microsoft researcher, built a team "outside Microsoft Research to build this out," Larus said.

Schulte, according to his bio on the Microsoft Research site, is heading up a team called Tools for Software Engineers (TSE). TSE "is creating a future where Microsoft's software engineering systems are considered best-in-class industry wide," according to the TSE page on Microsoft's site.

There are two current TSE projects, according to the site:

CloudDev - bring all of the positive network effects afforded by cloud computing to the practice of software development at Microsoft. Provides cloud-based build, test, and analytics services to product groups across Microsoft. The first short-term objective is to shorten the continuous integration cycle time - the minimum time required for a typical source code change to move from check-in to compiled and unit tested binary.

CodeMine - provide the right data, at the right time, in the right context for making engineering decisions. Building a Software Analytics Platform for Collecting and Analyzing Engineering Process Data at Microsoft.

I asked Microsoft if any current research projects, such as the Orleans cloud programming framework (on which Larus was the lead) were related to TSE and/or the Cloud Build work that Larus outlined. The Halo team at Microsoft has used Orleans to build services that are hosted on Windows Azure. A company spokesperson declined comment.